1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for measuring a transmission bandwidth for media streaming and a method thereof, and more particularly, to a system for measuring a transmission bandwidth for media streaming and a method thereof that are capable of calculating the transmission bandwidth by using a transmission packet to be transmitted to a receiver without transmitting a proving packet to the receiver and streaming media data to a receiver by using the transmission bandwidth in a service for streaming the media data such as a moving picture in real time.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, Internet transmits and receives data in the unit of a packet. At this time, a transmission bandwidth between two terminals that communicate with each other is not always ensured but if a path is selected, data is transmitted and received while dynamically occupying the bandwidth in the unit of each packet.
Due to such a network characteristic, a call quality is not ensured at predetermined level and the packet is lost or delayed depending on Internet conditions, thus, the call quality may be deteriorated. As Internet supply is spread, the performance or capacity of a network system itself is improved and an environment where Internet is connectable is also increased.
However, in spite of a situation where a demand for the capacity of a network bandwidth is rapidly increased with an increase in the number of Internet users and the number of real-time media communication applications, a bandwidth enough to deal with the real-time communication application is not substantially easy to ensure.
Further Internet cannot continuously occupy a bandwidth required during call connection due to characteristics of the network. Therefore, a bandwidth usable during call or depending on a call time is rapidly changed. A bandwidth approximately 5 to 10 times larger than a voice call is required to transmit and receive video data comparatively more than voice data in a good quality and if this condition is not satisfied, a video call quality may remarkably be deteriorated.
A function to control the bandwidth is very important in a video call and in general, a video terminal previously determines a bandwidth to be used before the call and can transmit and receive a video in accordance with the bandwidth. However, it is difficult to deal with a bandwidth which dynamically varies during the call by the above scheme.
FIG. 1 is a diagram for describing a known method for measuring a transmission bandwidth.
Referring to FIG. 1, a server transmits two or more proving packets to a receiver (S110).
At this time, the server transmits a proving packet including information on a transmission time to the receiver.
The receiver receives the proving packet including the transmission time information and acquires a reception interval between the two received packets and thereafter, calculates the transmission bandwidth as shown in Equation 1 on the basis of the reception interval (S120).
In addition, the receiver transmits the calculated transmission bandwidth to the server (S130).
Therefore, the server streams media by using the transmission bandwidth received from the receiver (S140).
That is, as shown in FIG. 2, the known transmission bandwidth measuring method requires a process in which the proving packet is transmitted from the server to the receiver separately from the transmission data for verification.
Further, since the proving packet is transmitted separately from the transmission data, the transmission bandwidth is additionally occupied by the proving packet.